Architecture and Public Policy

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CIS explores how changes in the architecture of computer networks affect the economic environment for innovation and competition on the Internet, and how the law should react to those changes. This work has lead us to analyze the issue of network neutrality, perhaps the Internet's most debated policy issue, which concerns Internet user's ability to access the content and software of their choice without interference from network providers.

Professor of Law and Helen L. Crocker Faculty Scholar at Stanford Law School, Director of Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society, and Associate Professor (by courtesy) of Electrical Engineering, Stanford University

Barbara van Schewick is a Professor of Law and Helen L. Crocker Faculty Scholar at Stanford Law School, Director of Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society, and Associate Professor (by courtesy) of Electrical Engineering in Stanford University’s Department of Electrical Engineering

Marvin Ammori is a leading First Amendment lawyer and Internet policy expert. He was instrumental to the adoption of network neutrality rules in the US and abroad–having been perhaps the nation’s leading legal advocate advancing network neutrality–and also instrumental to the defeat of the SOPA and PIPA copyright/censorship bills.

Valarie Kaur is a Non-Residential Fellow at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. She is a lawyer, documentary filmmaker, and interfaith organizer who helps communities tell their stories and organize for social change. She has made award-winning films and led multimedia campaigns on civil rights issues: hate crimes, racial profiling, gun violence, marriage equality, immigration detention, and solitary confinement.

Emily Baxter is a research associate for Women's Economic Policy at the Center for American Progress, focusing on women's and families' economic security, women's leadership, and work-family balance. She previously worked as the special assistant for the Faith and Progressive Policy Initiative at the Center. In the fall of 2012, Emily was a field organizer for President Obama’s re-election campaign near her hometown of Erie, Pennsylvania.

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Today, the Open Internet Order becomes effective. Adopted after a year of national debate, the order codifies “net neutrality” — the principle that keeps the Internet an open and democratic space. Specifically, it bans carriers like Comcast and Verizon from blocking and slowing down websites at will, or charging sites extra fees to reach people faster.

Today, after more than a year of national debate, the Open Internet Order goes into effect. The Order keeps the Internet an open and democratic space free from undue corporate control. Business leaders, start-up innovators, and economists widely praise the Order as win for the economic growth.

But protecting the open Internet is not just sound policy -- it's a moral imperative.

The recent leak of a secret chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership’s Investor-State Dispute Settlement system (ISDS) is getting many people on both the left and the right upset. Left-wingers don’t like a system in which corporations can push back against government regulations. Right-wingers don’t like a system where U.N.-affiliated tribunals can overturn U.S. law.

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Comcast Corp. v. FCC is a 2010 United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia case holding that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) does not have ancillary jurisdiction over Comcast’s Internet service under the language of the Communications Act of 1934. In so holding, the Court vacated a 2008 order issued by the FCC that asserted jurisdiction over Comcast’s network management polices and censured Comcast from interfering with its subscribers' use of peer-to-peer software.

In 2005, on the same day the FCC re-classified DSL service and effectively reduced the regulatory obligations of DSL providers, the FCC announced its unanimous view that consumers are entitled to certain rights and expectations with respect to their broadband service, including the right to:

"Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the World Wide Web, has pleaded with EU regulators to sew up the loopholes in the bloc’s new net neutrality rules, which aim to maintain a level playing field on the Internet.

Berners-Lee, along with activist academics Lawrence Lessig and Barbara van Schewick, published an open letter to citizens, lawmakers and regulators, declaring there were “four days to save the open Internet in Europe.”

"Barbara van Schewick, a Stanford law professor and net neutrality expert, filed a report earlier this year with the FCC claiming Binge On "harms competition, innovation and free speech." The program likely violates the FCC's net neutrality rules, she argued, because its technical requirements "categorically exclude" some content providers."

Over 800 attendees registered at the State of the Net Conference (SOTN) in 2015. The conference provides unparalleled opportunities to network and engage on key Internet policy issues. SOTN is the largest Internet policy conference in the U.S. and the only one with over 50 percent Congressional staff and government policymakers in attendance.